“No, you don’t,” Mooney said. “She was your sister, and it’s an entirely different feeling. You never had to fight against something inside, something that said you were male and she was female. I wanted her so much that I used to steal from drugstores to poison myself so I’d get an upset stomach and have the cramps to think about.”
Kerrigan looked at him.
“Why didn’t you let her know?”
“I couldn’t. She’d have felt sorry for me. She might have done something that she didn’t want to do. Just to make things easier for me. It would have been an act of charity. You see, if I thought she went for me, I’d have asked her to marry me.”
“You should have told her.”
Mooney sighed slowly. He looked at the floor. He said, “She was clean. And I’m a dirty man. It’s the kind of dirt that don’t wash off. It’s in too deep. Too many memories of dirty places and dirty women.”
“You’re not so dirty. And I think you should have told her.”
“Well maybe I wasn’t man enough.” Mooney turned and looked up at the picture on the wall.
Kerrigan looked at Mooney and felt very sorry for him and couldn’t say anything.
“Not man enough,” Mooney said. “Just a specialist in the art of wasting time and lousing things up. There was a time the critics had me ranked with the important names in water color. They said I’d soon be pushing Marin for the number-one spot on the list. Today I’m pushing the sale of window signs for butcher stores and tailor shops. My weekly income, according to latest reports, is anywhere from twelve to fifteen dollars. If the Treasury Department is interested, the current bankroll is a dollar and sixty-seven cents.”